*Batten Fellow, Darden Business School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2004.
*Visiting professor, University of Munich, 2004.
*2003 Reckoning with Risk shortlisted for the Aventis Prize for Science Books
*2002 Science Book of the Year Prize for Einmaleins der Skepsis (German translation of Calculated Risks), awarded by bild der wissenschaft

Quotes:

“What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?”

“Isn’t more information always better?” asks Gerd Gigerenzer. “Why else would bestsellers on how to make good decisions tell us to consider all pieces of information, weigh them carefully, and compute the optimal choice, preferably with the aid of a fancy statistical software package? In economics, Nobel prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that people make decisions as if they had perfect information and could compute the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do real people make good decisions under the usual conditions of little time and scarce information?”